Juliette Binoche

Binoche was born in Paris, the daughter of Jean-Marie Binoche, a director, actor, and sculptor, and Monique Yvette Stalens (born 1939), a teacher, director, and actress.

Her father, who is French, also has one eighth Portuguese-Brazilian ancestry; he was raised partly in Morocco by his French-born parents.

Her mother was born in Częstochowa, Poland.

Binoche's maternal grandfather, Andre Stalens, was born in Poland, of Belgian (Walloon) and French descent, and Binoche's maternal grandmother, Julia Helena Młynarczyk, was of Polish origin.

Both of them were actors who were born in Częstochowa; the German Nazi occupiers imprisoned them at Auschwitz as intellectuals.

Juliette Binoche (born 9 March 1964) is a French actress.

She has appeared in more than 60 films, particularly in French and English languages, and has been the recipient of numerous accolades, including an Academy Award, a British Academy Film Award and a César Award.

When Binoche's parents divorced in 1968, four-year-old Juliette and her sister Marion were sent to a provincial boarding school.

During their teens, the Binoche sisters spent their school holidays with their maternal grandmother, not seeing their parents for months at a time.

Binoche has stated that this perceived parental abandonment had a profound effect on her.

She was not particularly academic and in her teenage years began acting at school in amateur stage productions.

At seventeen, she directed and starred in a student production of the Eugène Ionesco play, Exit the King.

She studied acting at the Conservatoire National Supérieur d'Art Dramatique (CNSAD), but quit after a short time as she disliked the curriculum.

In the early 1980s, she found an agent through a friend and joined a theater troupe, touring France, Belgium and Switzerland under the pseudonym "Juliette Adrienne".

Around this time, she began lessons with acting coach Vera Gregh.

Her first professional screen experience came as an extra in the three-part TF1 television series Dorothée, danseuse de corde (1983) directed by Jacques Fansten, followed by a similarly small role in the provincial television film Fort bloque directed by Pierrick Guinnard.

After this, Binoche secured her first feature-film appearance with a minor role in Pascal Kané's Liberty Belle (1983).

Her role required just two days on-set, but was enough to inspire Binoche to pursue a career in film.

Binoche's early films established her as a French star of some renown.

In 1983, she auditioned for the female lead in Jean-Luc Godard's controversial Hail Mary, a modern retelling of the Virgin birth.

Godard requested a meeting with Binoche having seen a photo of her taken by her boyfriend at the time.

Although she said she spent six months on the film's set in Geneva, her presence in the final cut is confined to just a few scenes.

Further supporting roles followed in a variety of French films.

Annick Lanoë's Les Nanas gave Binoche her most noteworthy role to date, playing opposite established stars Marie-France Pisier and Macha Méril in a mainstream comedy, though she has stated the experience was not particularly memorable or influential.

She gained more significant exposure in Jacques Doillon's critically acclaimed Family Life cast as the volatile teenage step-daughter of Sami Frey's central character.

This film was to set the tone of her early career.

Doillon has commented that in the original screenplay her character was written to be 14 years old, but he was so impressed with Binoche's audition he changed the character's age to 17 to allow her take the role.

Binoche first gained recognition for working with such auteur directors as Jean-Luc Godard (Hail Mary, 1985), Jacques Doillon (Family Life, 1985), and André Téchiné; the latter made her a star in France with a leading role in his drama Rendez-vous (1985).

In April 1985, Binoche followed this with another supporting role in Bob Decout's Adieu Blaireau, a policier thriller starring Philippe Léotard and Annie Girardot.

Adieu Blaireau failed to have much impact with critics or audiences.

It was to be later in 1985 that Binoche would fully emerge as a leading actress with her role in André Téchiné's Rendez-vous.

She was cast at short notice when Sandrine Bonnaire had to abandon the film due to a scheduling conflict.

Rendez-vous premiered at the 1985 Cannes Film Festival, winning Best Director.

The film was a sensation and Binoche became the darling of the festival.

She won the Volpi Cup and César Award for Best Actress for her performance as a grieving music composer in Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colours: Blue (1993) and the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for playing a nurse in The English Patient (1996).

Binoche has appeared on stage intermittently, most notably in a 1998 London production of Luigi Pirandello's Naked and in a 2000 production of Harold Pinter's Betrayal on Broadway for which she was nominated for a Tony Award.

For starring in the romantic film Chocolat (2000), Binoche received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress.

In 2008, she began a world tour with a modern dance production in-i devised in collaboration with Akram Khan.

In 2010, she won the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actress for her role as an antiques dealer in Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy.

Binoche has since starred in such films as Clouds of Sils Maria (2014), High Life (2018) and The Taste of Things (2023).